I'm obviously concerned that Bolsonaro doesn't believe in climate change and is therefore prepared to act in ways that increase that problem. I also though think its a major problem that he's prepared to lie about the evidence of what's happening. (..).
Bolsonaro said in one of his debates that climate change is real but the question is how much is caused by the humans and how much by the nature
About Greenland, anyone believes in an risk of war over it?
Ted Cruz thinks Trump might nuke Denmark. Video last page.
There is no scientific controversy as to whether climate change is anthropogenic or not. It is, and this has been established fairly conclusively and repeatedly. Even some petroleum companies did the research in the late 70s and early 80s, only to push propaganda denouncing the concept to keep their profits up. This too is documented.
That is to say, the recent shift from "climate change isn't real" to "climate change is real but it might just be natural causes" is just continuing propaganda to avoid facing the very real danger anthropogenic climate change represents.
According to some models used in 1950, Falklands should be underwater. Mauritius too... Scientific community consensus is not an absolute dogma. And on past, people was saying that deforestation would reduce the temperature, not increase like the José Lutzenbergerhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Lutzenberger
But pollution is obviously bad. Climate changes being human made or not and the best thing that the state can do is to cut taxes, regulations and bureaucracy on green energy.
According to some models used in 1950, Falklands should be underwater. Mauritius too... Scientific community consensus is not an absolute dogma. And on past, people was saying that deforestation would reduce the temperature, not increase like the José Lutzenbergerhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Lutzenberger
But pollution is obviously bad. Climate changes being human made or not and the best thing that the state can do is to cut taxes, regulations and bureaucracy on green energy.
As with the debate on gun control, *one* anecdote is not actual evidence.
Edit: I love how the writers of most of these articles are so shocked that you can see the fires from 'space'. Hell, with Google maps I can see the deck in my backyard from 'space'. Whoopdy doo...
Pick pictures of Bolivian deforestation/fire from years ago and say that is on Brazil in 2019
Ignore that Amazonas state is near Venezuela, since Venezuela is a failed socialist country(redundancy), a lot of people are illegally settling in the Forest to not starve to death under socialism. This is becoming common since the life of illegals is becoming harder and harsher in Roraima. They rather be an illegal immigrant in the poorest Brazilian state or in an deadly forest live under Maduro's Regime.
And honestly, Bolsonaro is being much harsher against environmental disaster than any of worker's party but he isn't an dictator. He can't ignore the law and punishes this people like they deserve... IMO if you let the indigenous people take care of the forest, not an centralized bureaucracy, most problems will be solved.
And honestly, Bolsonaro is being much harsher against environmental disaster than any of worker's party but he isn't an dictator. He can't ignore the law and punishes this people like they deserve... IMO if you let the indigenous people take care of the forest, not an centralized bureaucracy, most problems will be solved.
That's odd because according to the free press, he encouraged this disaster.
And while natives would take better care of the forest, that's totally the opposite of what bolsanaro is doing. He's trying to make money off of it at any cost. In fact, he's said they get “not one centimeter of land will be demarcated for indigenous reserves or quilombolas (descendants of those people who freed themselves from slavery).
According to some models used in 1950, Falklands should be underwater. Mauritius too... Scientific community consensus is not an absolute dogma. And on past, people was saying that deforestation would reduce the temperature, not increase like the José Lutzenbergerhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Lutzenberger
There was no scientific consensus in the 1950s that there was even a problem, let alone what the results of that would be. Scientific theories may be formed initially purely as a thought experiment, but in order to achieve a scientific consensus a theory has to be tested against experimental data - and that's what's been done with climate change. That does not just consist of stating a mechanism (the greenhouse effect), but producing models predicting how that mechanism will result in changes (in this case to the earth's climate). Climate models are not just about predicting the future, they also have to predict the past to be taken seriously. Climate change is not just something that's going to happen to our children someday - the effects are visible on the earth now and have been for quite a few years.
Pollution is only "obviously bad" if you're using that as the definition of pollution. If you take the definition as something like "substances that cause harm to the environment" then it's actually very rarely the case that pollution has been recognized as obviously bad when the relevant substances were first introduced. Take something like smoking for instance, which for years was marketed as being good for you. There's now a scientific consensus that's not the case, but even now there are people that don't believe the evidence that smoking is harmful - and that evidence has been around for longer than that for climate change.
The consensus on smoking is also not something that's been static over time. For instance it's only relatively recently there's been a scientific consensus that secondary (or passive) smoking is bad for you. That's resulted in legislation in many countries, but there are others that continue to deny this is a problem or believe the problem is too small to justify infringing personal rights.
Climate change is not unusual in that it takes a long time and has lots of hiccups to move from scientific consensus to action - that's typical for any issue. The reason that's such a problem for climate change is two-fold. Partly it's the sheer scale of the potential problem, but mainly it's because of the long lag between taking action and seeing the effects. The CO2 already in the environment would continue to have impacts on climate for hundreds of years to come, even if there were no new emissions from today. Even if we actively took CO2 out of the atmosphere (which is certainly something we're going to end up attempting to do in a major way, as a result of the delays in making reductions) there will be no instant results.
That means that things are going to get worse in the future, irrespective of any action we take. If we wait to take action until changes actually seen are generally recognized (by politicians and the public, not just scientists) as very bad, that means that there will be disastrous changes still to come after we have taken action - and good luck explaining that to people who are still climate change deniers ...
good luck explaining that to people who are still climate change deniers ...
You would think in 2019 we wouldn't have people denyng that the Earth is round or thinking vaccines are bad but here we are. The internet has led to a ton of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
We're in a modern dark ages with Trump, Boris Johnson , Bolsanaro, Modi, and Netanyahu leading countries off the cliff.
"As of August 16, 2019, satellite observations indicated that total fire activity in the Amazon basin was slightly below average in comparison to the past 15 years. Though activity has been above average in Amazonas and to a lesser extent in Rondônia, it has been below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to the Global Fire Emissions Database."https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-brazil
So, as you can see, the fire problem is concentrated in states more close to Venezuela.
Grond0
As i've said, why not remove all taxes, regulations and bureaucracy in owning electric cars? Do you that an TESLA electric car due protectionism, tariffs and regulations can cost almost 10 years worth of an minimum wage job?
"why not use public transport", because s****. Seriously. Depending the distance, Uber is more economic and public transportation has a lot of problems with security and delays. Is not uncommon for people who uses regularly public transportation to waste hours per week only waiting, hours that could be spend with their families, working more, at gyn, playing video games... And due the government there are no concurrency.
Talking about security, some days ago an criminal took all passengers of an buss as an hostage, an sniper killed him saving a lot of people and preventing an waste of tax payer money into prisons and a lot of people and NGO protested it, saying that "could hit an innocent", well, IMO the buss company should have the right to hire someone only to shot the criminal in the face and free the hostages. Would be much quicker than wait the police and the policeman who shot the criminal doesn't deserve any punishment, deserve an medal and an salary bonus for saving dozens of people from the Hijacker
And honestly, Bolsonaro is being much harsher against environmental disaster than any of worker's party but he isn't an dictator. He can't ignore the law and punishes this people like they deserve.
The picture you paint is really not the one seen internationally - that picture is one of a president who is perfectly willing to ignore or change any law he doesn't like.
I posted recently on Bolsonara blaming the space agency for providing data showing a recent increase in deforestation. His reaction has been to sack the head of the agency and propose replacing it with a new body to provide data more to his liking.
Looking at what is actually happening (as opposed to what Bolsonaro says is happening), does not seem to support your view that Bolsonaro is keen on protecting the environment.
Amazonas is by the far the largest state with rainforest -- hence the name. It's another weird eliding of the truth to throw out Para and Mato Grosso without mentioning this.
As i've said, why not remove all taxes, regulations and bureaucracy in owning electric cars? Do you that an TESLA electric car due protectionism, tariffs and regulations can cost almost 10 years worth of an minimum wage job?
I would support removing taxes on electric cars. I think that's actually been done in the UK - even the standard road tax for cars does not apply to electric vehicles. I wouldn't remove all of what you describe as regulations and bureaucracy. I don't for instance have the time or expertise to review personally the safety of everything I own and would prefer that products are tested before being released to the public.
For many years there was a tax benefit to buying a hybrid gas-electric as an incentive to adopt an unconventional car. I think it was phased out a year or two ago.
There were also lots of non-tax incentives, such as being allowed into HOV lanes just because of being an unconventionald car.
The fuel efficiency can be radical. A few months ago my sister got a Prius v, which is something like a station wagon. She told me that if her husband were to drive it to work and back instead of his Toyota Tundra, it would literally pay for itself in gas savings. She is particularly happy with her new car given that they have themselves, a 1-YO baby, and 2 large dogs to cart around, and it does that quite well.
According to some models used in 1950, Falklands should be underwater. Mauritius too... Scientific community consensus is not an absolute dogma. And on past, people was saying that deforestation would reduce the temperature, not increase like the José Lutzenberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Lutzenberger
I'd say the climate scientists of 2019 know a bit more about this stuff than the climate scientists of 1950, though. This isn't something like the theory of relativity which stands the test of time and makes testable predictions that virtually always pans out. Clearly models in the 1950s were not accurate in terms of timeline, but they did predict a rise in sea level.
It's fairly clear that "deforestation decreasing the temperature" is not the case. Forests are a vital part of the carbon cycle. Trees take in CO2 and release oxygen. Fewer trees means more CO2, more CO2 means increasing temperatures. People believing differently in the past aren't really relevant.
I didn't present anthropogenic climate change as "dogma." I simply stated that scientific consensus is fairly conclusive. As in 95% of the climate researchers publishing climate science support the consensus that climate change is caused by humans.
This, by the way, shouldn't be remotely controversial. Carbon emissions globally in 2018 were 37.1 billion metric tons, and as of July 2019, carbon is present in the atmosphere at 409.04 parts per million per measurements taken August 20. These are emissions caused by industry, vehicles, livestock, energy production, etc. Fossil fuel use accounts for 87% of the carbon dioxide emissions.
Something that climate scientists did not account for was ocean warming and acidification due to absorption of CO2, which slowed down the temperature increase for a few years, but is why things like coral reefs getting bleached to death, destroying such ecosystems, has been happening. Half of the Great Coral Reef is dead now because of this.
We know where the carbon emissions are coming from and we know how much of it comes from human activity - most of it. And we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, meaning the more of it there is, the higher the temperatures will rise. The arctic tundra is melting. Polar ice is shrinking, and more of it is melting in the summer.
If you believe climate change (and consequent global warming) doesn't have primarily human causes, perhaps you have information on a large amount carbon that we don't produce, and where it might come from. So far all the carbon we know about is accounted for, so it'd have to be pretty compelling evidence of some other cause.
Also, the Sun isn't contributing to global warming, as it's having a cooling period. Despite the sun getting cooler this year has been the hottest on record, beating out last year, and last year beat the year before that, etc. Like the last 10 years are the 10 hottest years on record now?
There was one time in Earth's history that carbon got a lot higher than this. When the Siberian Traps erupted, very probably causing the Permian extinction. There were multiple factors at play, not the least of which was all the toxic crap the eruptions released into the atmosphere, but the magma burning through massive amounts of coal didn't actually make things better.
But hey, there's a possibility that rising temperatures will melt the methane clathrates and cause runaway, catastrophic global warming. I guess in a technical sense one could argue that those aren't technically human-caused, as they've been there much longer than hominids have existed. But of course, human activity is what's leading to the temperature possibly being high enough to set them off, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
As i've said, why not remove all taxes, regulations and bureaucracy in owning electric cars? Do you that an TESLA electric car due protectionism, tariffs and regulations can cost almost 10 years worth of an minimum wage job?
I would support removing taxes on electric cars. I think that's actually been done in the UK - even the standard road tax for cars does not apply to electric vehicles. I wouldn't remove all of what you describe as regulations and bureaucracy. I don't for instance have the time or expertise to review personally the safety of everything I own and would prefer that products are tested before being released to the public.
In the US at least, reduced regulations virtually always leads to more damage to the climate.
As i've said, why not remove all taxes, regulations and bureaucracy in owning electric cars? Do you that an TESLA electric car due protectionism, tariffs and regulations can cost almost 10 years worth of an minimum wage job?
I would support removing taxes on electric cars. I think that's actually been done in the UK - even the standard road tax for cars does not apply to electric vehicles. I wouldn't remove all of what you describe as regulations and bureaucracy. I don't for instance have the time or expertise to review personally the safety of everything I own and would prefer that products are tested before being released to the public.
In the US at least, reduced regulations virtually always leads to more damage to the climate.
Not surprisingly so, since contrary to what Libertarians like to claim regulations almost always get passed after several incidents that demonstrate the need for them.
As i've said, why not remove all taxes, regulations and bureaucracy in owning electric cars? Do you that an TESLA electric car due protectionism, tariffs and regulations can cost almost 10 years worth of an minimum wage job?
I would support removing taxes on electric cars. I think that's actually been done in the UK - even the standard road tax for cars does not apply to electric vehicles. I wouldn't remove all of what you describe as regulations and bureaucracy. I don't for instance have the time or expertise to review personally the safety of everything I own and would prefer that products are tested before being released to the public.
In the US at least, reduced regulations virtually always leads to more damage to the climate.
Not surprisingly so, since contrary to what Libertarians like to claim regulations almost always get passed after several incidents that demonstrate the need for them.
Yep. We've seen what corporations do when they're not required to do the right thing.
As i've said, why not remove all taxes, regulations and bureaucracy in owning electric cars? Do you that an TESLA electric car due protectionism, tariffs and regulations can cost almost 10 years worth of an minimum wage job?
I would support removing taxes on electric cars. I think that's actually been done in the UK - even the standard road tax for cars does not apply to electric vehicles. I wouldn't remove all of what you describe as regulations and bureaucracy. I don't for instance have the time or expertise to review personally the safety of everything I own and would prefer that products are tested before being released to the public.
In the US at least, reduced regulations virtually always leads to more damage to the climate.
Not surprisingly so, since contrary to what Libertarians like to claim regulations almost always get passed after several incidents that demonstrate the need for them.
A saying I always found funny was "For every dumb warning sign you see, someone was stupid enough that caused the need for that sign to be put there."
For those of you losing sleep over the oceans warming 'much quicker' than ever before. The scientific paper news outlet scare-mongers were touting was just, well, wrong. Ooops. Since is the first I'd heard of this scientific paper's erroneous conclusions I'm guessing it was crickets from CNN and the rest....
For those of you losing sleep over the oceans warming 'much quicker' than ever before. The scientific study news outlet scare-mongers were touting was just, well, wrong. Ooops. Since is the first I'd heard of this study's erroneous conclusions I'm guessing it was crickets from CNN and the rest....
For those of you losing sleep over the oceans warming 'much quicker' than ever before. The scientific study news outlet scare-mongers were touting was just, well, wrong. Ooops. Since is the first I'd heard of this study's erroneous conclusions I'm guessing it was crickets from CNN and the rest....
Yes, but exaggerations, scare-mongering and data manipulation will undermine the goal of convincing people to do something about it. Everytime I read a headline now about climate change, health, food, politics, disease, multi-national corporations, etc... I just roll my eyes and wonder, "What's going to kill me now?". Then I remember that one of the biggest destroyers of people's health is stress, and I realize that it's the news media itself that's really killing us...
I find the oceans' absorption of CO2 and subsequent acidification a bit more concerning in the short term, but in the long term the ocean warming is going to have a severe impact on sea life. The temperature increase may not be precisely measured, but as I pointed out, the change in pH has killed half of the great coral reef.
For those of you losing sleep over the oceans warming 'much quicker' than ever before. The scientific study news outlet scare-mongers were touting was just, well, wrong. Ooops. Since is the first I'd heard of this study's erroneous conclusions I'm guessing it was crickets from CNN and the rest....
Yes, but exaggerations, scare-mongering and data manipulation will undermine the goal of convincing people to do something about it. Everytime I read a headline now about climate change, health, food, politics, disease, multi-national corporations, etc... I just roll my eyes and wonder, "What's going to kill me now?". Then I remember that one of the biggest destroyers of people's health is stress, and I realize that it's the news media itself that's really killing us...
This wasn't a story of data manipulation however. It was a story of an honest mistake of calculation.
There's a failure to grasp the greater context of what actually gets published in scientific journals here, imo. The idea that all studies need to be free from error is a failure to understand what cutting-edge science does. There's always going to be error. And there's always going to subsequent studies that debunk in part what past studies did. Even Newton's original model of physics failed to accurately predict the motion of the planets in the solar system to the utmost precision. And it was only later using modeling from relativity theory that we have more precise predictions. This is an important lesson in the flawed but accretive nature of science.
Moreover, you can't even expect every scientist to be at the level of Newton. There's enormous professional pressure -- that has nothing to do with a stance on climate change -- to publish as frequently as possible. This will inevitably result in erroneous results. These things are being done by graduate students half the time.
For those of you losing sleep over the oceans warming 'much quicker' than ever before. The scientific study news outlet scare-mongers were touting was just, well, wrong. Ooops. Since is the first I'd heard of this study's erroneous conclusions I'm guessing it was crickets from CNN and the rest....
Yes, but exaggerations, scare-mongering and data manipulation will undermine the goal of convincing people to do something about it. Everytime I read a headline now about climate change, health, food, politics, disease, multi-national corporations, etc... I just roll my eyes and wonder, "What's going to kill me now?". Then I remember that one of the biggest destroyers of people's health is stress, and I realize that it's the news media itself that's really killing us...
This wasn't a story of data manipulation however. It was a story of an honest mistake of calculation.
There's a failure to grasp the greater context of what actually gets published in scientific journals here, imo. The idea that all studies need to be free from error is a failure to understand what cutting-edge science does. There's always going to be error. And there's always going to subsequent studies that debunk in part what past studies did. Even Newton's original model of physics failed to accurately predict the motion of the planets in the solar system to the utmost precision. And it was only later using modeling from relativity theory that we have more precise predictions. This is an important lesson in the flawed but accretive nature of science.
Moreover, you can't even expect every scientist to be at the level of Newton. There's enormous professional pressure -- that has nothing to do with a stance on climate change -- to publish as frequently as possible. This will inevitably result in erroneous results. These things are being done by graduate students half the time.
I agree, but the media wasn't waiting to pounce all over Newton's discoveries and tout them as gospel to sell papers. Nor was Newton predicting some Apocolypse. It's the very Apocolyptic nature of this that is making me more sceptical, not less. It's really not much different from religion from my point of view.
For those of you losing sleep over the oceans warming 'much quicker' than ever before. The scientific study news outlet scare-mongers were touting was just, well, wrong. Ooops. Since is the first I'd heard of this study's erroneous conclusions I'm guessing it was crickets from CNN and the rest....
Yes, but exaggerations, scare-mongering and data manipulation will undermine the goal of convincing people to do something about it. Everytime I read a headline now about climate change, health, food, politics, disease, multi-national corporations, etc... I just roll my eyes and wonder, "What's going to kill me now?". Then I remember that one of the biggest destroyers of people's health is stress, and I realize that it's the news media itself that's really killing us...
This was a mistake, not data manipulation. And it was corrected by the scientific community only one month later.
Yes, but exaggerations, scare-mongering and data manipulation will undermine the goal of convincing people to do something about it. Everytime I read a headline now about climate change, health, food, politics, disease, multi-national corporations, etc... I just roll my eyes and wonder, "What's going to kill me now?". Then I remember that one of the biggest destroyers of people's health is stress, and I realize that it's the news media itself that's really killing us...
So you show us an honest error in one study that misreported the amount of heating the ocean's undergone, but did not in fact misreport that the ocean's temperature is rising, and that's somehow evidence of widespread exaggerations, scare-mongering, and data manipulation?
I mean I'd love it if 95% of all climate scientists were wrong, but actually existing evidence points to "they're actually right."
The real problem is getting governments and businesses to do anything about it. The former (in the US) won't do anything as long as the kleptocracy runs everything, and the latter will only do it if forced by regulations that the government won't implement because everyone making the decisions is beholden to those same businesses to some extent.
One of the worst things the Republican party ever did, was convince 29-50% of US citizens that climate change and global warming were fake news. Possibly the worst thing.
I agree, but the media wasn't waiting to pounce all over Newton's discoveries and tout them as gospel to sell papers. Nor was Newton predicting some Apocolypse. It's the very Apocolyptic nature of this that is making me more sceptical, not less. It's really not much different from religion from my point of view.
Humans aren't special. We're not immune to what's happened to so many different species that went before us. The question isn't if humanity will eventually die out, but when and how. Also, when 97% of the scientists in a given field agree that a particular thing is happening, it's not religious to consider the possibility that they might be onto something.
For those of you losing sleep over the oceans warming 'much quicker' than ever before. The scientific paper news outlet scare-mongers were touting was just, well, wrong. Ooops. Since is the first I'd heard of this scientific paper's erroneous conclusions I'm guessing it was crickets from CNN and the rest....
Or just possibly the reason you hadn't heard this before is because it was one study out of the many hundreds carried out and the main reason for singling it out would be to use the initial error in the paper to cast doubt on climate change that does not in fact exist . The thrust of the article you link to is not just that there was an error made, but that this is a good demonstration of the way science should work, i.e. that data are made available for testing by others and corrected when errors are found.
If there was a point of interest about the study, it was that they used a different methodology to estimate temperature changes in the oceans. The reason the publication originally received some attention was that this method appeared to suggest previous estimates of temperature changes were significantly too low. The revised results though broadly confirm previous estimates, i.e. they just add one more piece of evidence that the existing climate change models are accurately predicting what is happening to the earth's natural systems.
If you are interested in the impact of climate change on the oceans, you might want to have a look at the IPCC paper on "The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate" that is due to be published next month. The IPCC reports are the gold standard for climate change reporting largely because of the amount of effort they put into getting the papers reviewed before publication to try and ensure this type of error does not slip through. The review process for this particular report started in May 2018.
By the way if you want to see what the error referred to in the article was, you can find details of the discussion between the paper's authors and Nicolas Lewis here (though it's a bit technical). The reason I looked for that was because Nicolas Lewis is described in the article as an independent climate scientist who does not believe in human induced global warming. That seemed so unlikely to me that I thought I would look at his work to see what he says himself. Here's a quick summary of my conclusions:
- he's a true skeptic in that he loves nothing more than pointing out errors by other people. That's an incredibly valuable feature in a scientist and, however annoying it may sometimes be to authors, should be treasured .
- he accepts the basic tenet of climate change that human produced CO2 results in higher temperatures.
- the largest element of his work relates to the sensitivity of the earth to changes in the level of CO2. The IPCC estimates that a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels would lead to warming of 1.5 to 4.5 C. The reason Lewis is viewed as a climate change skeptic is that he estimates a much lower range of 1.2 to 1.8 C. The difference seems to be partly a feature of the length of time the estimate is expected to cover, but mainly reflects Lewis assumes a significantly higher future absorption of CO2 by natural processes. Thus Lewis believes that if no more CO2 is produced in future the current rise in temperature would slow down and stop much quicker than assumed by the IPCC - but if CO2 continues to be produced the temperature will keep rising.
For those of you losing sleep over the oceans warming 'much quicker' than ever before. The scientific study news outlet scare-mongers were touting was just, well, wrong. Ooops. Since is the first I'd heard of this study's erroneous conclusions I'm guessing it was crickets from CNN and the rest....
Yes, but exaggerations, scare-mongering and data manipulation will undermine the goal of convincing people to do something about it. Everytime I read a headline now about climate change, health, food, politics, disease, multi-national corporations, etc... I just roll my eyes and wonder, "What's going to kill me now?". Then I remember that one of the biggest destroyers of people's health is stress, and I realize that it's the news media itself that's really killing us...
This wasn't a story of data manipulation however. It was a story of an honest mistake of calculation.
There's a failure to grasp the greater context of what actually gets published in scientific journals here, imo. The idea that all studies need to be free from error is a failure to understand what cutting-edge science does. There's always going to be error. And there's always going to subsequent studies that debunk in part what past studies did. Even Newton's original model of physics failed to accurately predict the motion of the planets in the solar system to the utmost precision. And it was only later using modeling from relativity theory that we have more precise predictions. This is an important lesson in the flawed but accretive nature of science.
Moreover, you can't even expect every scientist to be at the level of Newton. There's enormous professional pressure -- that has nothing to do with a stance on climate change -- to publish as frequently as possible. This will inevitably result in erroneous results. These things are being done by graduate students half the time.
I agree, but the media wasn't waiting to pounce all over Newton's discoveries and tout them as gospel to sell papers. Nor was Newton predicting some Apocolypse. It's the very Apocolyptic nature of this that is making me more sceptical, not less. It's really not much different from religion from my point of view.
There's always been an interesting relationship between science and religion - and that's always been used as a source of news. I think Galileo's trial for claiming that the earth revolved around the sun would have been comparable to the OJ Simpson trial in relation to the amount of media interest - and he was only put on trial in the first place because of the media interest in his 'sensationalist' claims.
Comments
Ted Cruz thinks Trump might nuke Denmark. Video last page.
That is to say, the recent shift from "climate change isn't real" to "climate change is real but it might just be natural causes" is just continuing propaganda to avoid facing the very real danger anthropogenic climate change represents.
But pollution is obviously bad. Climate changes being human made or not and the best thing that the state can do is to cut taxes, regulations and bureaucracy on green energy.
As with the debate on gun control, *one* anecdote is not actual evidence.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/amazon-rainforest-on-fire-2019/
Edit: I love how the writers of most of these articles are so shocked that you can see the fires from 'space'. Hell, with Google maps I can see the deck in my backyard from 'space'. Whoopdy doo...
And honestly, Bolsonaro is being much harsher against environmental disaster than any of worker's party but he isn't an dictator. He can't ignore the law and punishes this people like they deserve... IMO if you let the indigenous people take care of the forest, not an centralized bureaucracy, most problems will be solved.
That's odd because according to the free press, he encouraged this disaster.
He's also lying about it blaming it on NGOs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/21/jair-bolsonaro-accuses-ngos-setting-fire-amazon-rainforest
Claiming that he's harsher on environmental disaster when in fact he's done everything in his power to encourage it is what we call "fake news".
In fact, he's been blasted by many people because he's doing nothing.
#PRAYFORAMAZONIA TRENDS AS BRAZIL'S JAIR BOLSONARO BLASTED FOR INACTION OVER 3-WEEK-LONG FOREST FIRES RAVAGING THE 'LUNGS OF OUR PLANET'
https://www.newsweek.com/pray-amazonia-brazil-jair-bolsonaro-forest-fires-lungs-planet-1455189
And while natives would take better care of the forest, that's totally the opposite of what bolsanaro is doing. He's trying to make money off of it at any cost. In fact, he's said they get “not one centimeter of land will be demarcated for indigenous reserves or quilombolas (descendants of those people who freed themselves from slavery).
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/10/30/bolsonaro-brazil-slayer-amazon
There was no scientific consensus in the 1950s that there was even a problem, let alone what the results of that would be. Scientific theories may be formed initially purely as a thought experiment, but in order to achieve a scientific consensus a theory has to be tested against experimental data - and that's what's been done with climate change. That does not just consist of stating a mechanism (the greenhouse effect), but producing models predicting how that mechanism will result in changes (in this case to the earth's climate). Climate models are not just about predicting the future, they also have to predict the past to be taken seriously. Climate change is not just something that's going to happen to our children someday - the effects are visible on the earth now and have been for quite a few years.
Pollution is only "obviously bad" if you're using that as the definition of pollution. If you take the definition as something like "substances that cause harm to the environment" then it's actually very rarely the case that pollution has been recognized as obviously bad when the relevant substances were first introduced. Take something like smoking for instance, which for years was marketed as being good for you. There's now a scientific consensus that's not the case, but even now there are people that don't believe the evidence that smoking is harmful - and that evidence has been around for longer than that for climate change.
The consensus on smoking is also not something that's been static over time. For instance it's only relatively recently there's been a scientific consensus that secondary (or passive) smoking is bad for you. That's resulted in legislation in many countries, but there are others that continue to deny this is a problem or believe the problem is too small to justify infringing personal rights.
Climate change is not unusual in that it takes a long time and has lots of hiccups to move from scientific consensus to action - that's typical for any issue. The reason that's such a problem for climate change is two-fold. Partly it's the sheer scale of the potential problem, but mainly it's because of the long lag between taking action and seeing the effects. The CO2 already in the environment would continue to have impacts on climate for hundreds of years to come, even if there were no new emissions from today. Even if we actively took CO2 out of the atmosphere (which is certainly something we're going to end up attempting to do in a major way, as a result of the delays in making reductions) there will be no instant results.
That means that things are going to get worse in the future, irrespective of any action we take. If we wait to take action until changes actually seen are generally recognized (by politicians and the public, not just scientists) as very bad, that means that there will be disastrous changes still to come after we have taken action - and good luck explaining that to people who are still climate change deniers ...
You would think in 2019 we wouldn't have people denyng that the Earth is round or thinking vaccines are bad but here we are. The internet has led to a ton of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
We're in a modern dark ages with Trump, Boris Johnson , Bolsanaro, Modi, and Netanyahu leading countries off the cliff.
"As of August 16, 2019, satellite observations indicated that total fire activity in the Amazon basin was slightly below average in comparison to the past 15 years. Though activity has been above average in Amazonas and to a lesser extent in Rondônia, it has been below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to the Global Fire Emissions Database." https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-brazil
So, as you can see, the fire problem is concentrated in states more close to Venezuela.
Grond0
As i've said, why not remove all taxes, regulations and bureaucracy in owning electric cars? Do you that an TESLA electric car due protectionism, tariffs and regulations can cost almost 10 years worth of an minimum wage job?
"why not use public transport", because s****. Seriously. Depending the distance, Uber is more economic and public transportation has a lot of problems with security and delays. Is not uncommon for people who uses regularly public transportation to waste hours per week only waiting, hours that could be spend with their families, working more, at gyn, playing video games... And due the government there are no concurrency.
Talking about security, some days ago an criminal took all passengers of an buss as an hostage, an sniper killed him saving a lot of people and preventing an waste of tax payer money into prisons and a lot of people and NGO protested it, saying that "could hit an innocent", well, IMO the buss company should have the right to hire someone only to shot the criminal in the face and free the hostages. Would be much quicker than wait the police and the policeman who shot the criminal doesn't deserve any punishment, deserve an medal and an salary bonus for saving dozens of people from the Hijacker
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/20/americas/brazil-bridge-bus-hostage-intl/index.html
The picture you paint is really not the one seen internationally - that picture is one of a president who is perfectly willing to ignore or change any law he doesn't like.
I posted recently on Bolsonara blaming the space agency for providing data showing a recent increase in deforestation. His reaction has been to sack the head of the agency and propose replacing it with a new body to provide data more to his liking.
Other pieces of information from spending a few minutes on Google (edit: I obviously spent longer than I thought looking through things given that some of my response was ninja'd by @smeagolheart
- Bolsonara suggesting that NGOs are responsible for the recent increase in wildfires in the Amazon region.
- eight former Brazilian environment ministers complaining about dismantling environmental protections.
- a decree preventing action being taken against landowners for previous breaches of environmental protections (those protections have since been loosened as noted in the previous link).
- proposals to replace independent oversight of environmental policy with a small group of political appointees.
- a proposal during the election campaign to remove Brazil from the Paris accord. There's a link in that to another article explaining how he and his family have indeed disputed climate change. This article also covers other controversial proposals, such as the intention to allow exploitation of indigenous lands - that explains why those who are currently involved in such exploitation appear to be so confident that the existing law will not be applied against them.
Looking at what is actually happening (as opposed to what Bolsonaro says is happening), does not seem to support your view that Bolsonaro is keen on protecting the environment.
I would support removing taxes on electric cars. I think that's actually been done in the UK - even the standard road tax for cars does not apply to electric vehicles. I wouldn't remove all of what you describe as regulations and bureaucracy. I don't for instance have the time or expertise to review personally the safety of everything I own and would prefer that products are tested before being released to the public.
There were also lots of non-tax incentives, such as being allowed into HOV lanes just because of being an unconventionald car.
The fuel efficiency can be radical. A few months ago my sister got a Prius v, which is something like a station wagon. She told me that if her husband were to drive it to work and back instead of his Toyota Tundra, it would literally pay for itself in gas savings. She is particularly happy with her new car given that they have themselves, a 1-YO baby, and 2 large dogs to cart around, and it does that quite well.
I'd say the climate scientists of 2019 know a bit more about this stuff than the climate scientists of 1950, though. This isn't something like the theory of relativity which stands the test of time and makes testable predictions that virtually always pans out. Clearly models in the 1950s were not accurate in terms of timeline, but they did predict a rise in sea level.
It's fairly clear that "deforestation decreasing the temperature" is not the case. Forests are a vital part of the carbon cycle. Trees take in CO2 and release oxygen. Fewer trees means more CO2, more CO2 means increasing temperatures. People believing differently in the past aren't really relevant.
I didn't present anthropogenic climate change as "dogma." I simply stated that scientific consensus is fairly conclusive. As in 95% of the climate researchers publishing climate science support the consensus that climate change is caused by humans.
This, by the way, shouldn't be remotely controversial. Carbon emissions globally in 2018 were 37.1 billion metric tons, and as of July 2019, carbon is present in the atmosphere at 409.04 parts per million per measurements taken August 20. These are emissions caused by industry, vehicles, livestock, energy production, etc. Fossil fuel use accounts for 87% of the carbon dioxide emissions.
Something that climate scientists did not account for was ocean warming and acidification due to absorption of CO2, which slowed down the temperature increase for a few years, but is why things like coral reefs getting bleached to death, destroying such ecosystems, has been happening. Half of the Great Coral Reef is dead now because of this.
We know where the carbon emissions are coming from and we know how much of it comes from human activity - most of it. And we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, meaning the more of it there is, the higher the temperatures will rise. The arctic tundra is melting. Polar ice is shrinking, and more of it is melting in the summer.
If you believe climate change (and consequent global warming) doesn't have primarily human causes, perhaps you have information on a large amount carbon that we don't produce, and where it might come from. So far all the carbon we know about is accounted for, so it'd have to be pretty compelling evidence of some other cause.
Also, the Sun isn't contributing to global warming, as it's having a cooling period. Despite the sun getting cooler this year has been the hottest on record, beating out last year, and last year beat the year before that, etc. Like the last 10 years are the 10 hottest years on record now?
There was one time in Earth's history that carbon got a lot higher than this. When the Siberian Traps erupted, very probably causing the Permian extinction. There were multiple factors at play, not the least of which was all the toxic crap the eruptions released into the atmosphere, but the magma burning through massive amounts of coal didn't actually make things better.
But hey, there's a possibility that rising temperatures will melt the methane clathrates and cause runaway, catastrophic global warming. I guess in a technical sense one could argue that those aren't technically human-caused, as they've been there much longer than hominids have existed. But of course, human activity is what's leading to the temperature possibly being high enough to set them off, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
Oh yeah, petroleum executives should be tried for crimes against humanity.
Anyway, perhaps you have some compelling evidence that's not nearly 70 years old that maybe climate change might not be human caused?
Oh, and the UN's recent report on poverty and climate change is interesting if depressing reading.
In the US at least, reduced regulations virtually always leads to more damage to the climate.
Not surprisingly so, since contrary to what Libertarians like to claim regulations almost always get passed after several incidents that demonstrate the need for them.
Yep. We've seen what corporations do when they're not required to do the right thing.
A saying I always found funny was "For every dumb warning sign you see, someone was stupid enough that caused the need for that sign to be put there."
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-climate-scientists-wrong.amp
STILL WARMING.
Edit-Originally the estimate was 60% warmer. Now corrected, it's between 10% and 70% warmer. Yay?
Yes, but exaggerations, scare-mongering and data manipulation will undermine the goal of convincing people to do something about it. Everytime I read a headline now about climate change, health, food, politics, disease, multi-national corporations, etc... I just roll my eyes and wonder, "What's going to kill me now?". Then I remember that one of the biggest destroyers of people's health is stress, and I realize that it's the news media itself that's really killing us...
https://sos.noaa.gov/datasets/ocean-atmosphere-co2-exchange/
This wasn't a story of data manipulation however. It was a story of an honest mistake of calculation.
There's a failure to grasp the greater context of what actually gets published in scientific journals here, imo. The idea that all studies need to be free from error is a failure to understand what cutting-edge science does. There's always going to be error. And there's always going to subsequent studies that debunk in part what past studies did. Even Newton's original model of physics failed to accurately predict the motion of the planets in the solar system to the utmost precision. And it was only later using modeling from relativity theory that we have more precise predictions. This is an important lesson in the flawed but accretive nature of science.
Moreover, you can't even expect every scientist to be at the level of Newton. There's enormous professional pressure -- that has nothing to do with a stance on climate change -- to publish as frequently as possible. This will inevitably result in erroneous results. These things are being done by graduate students half the time.
I agree, but the media wasn't waiting to pounce all over Newton's discoveries and tout them as gospel to sell papers. Nor was Newton predicting some Apocolypse. It's the very Apocolyptic nature of this that is making me more sceptical, not less. It's really not much different from religion from my point of view.
This was a mistake, not data manipulation. And it was corrected by the scientific community only one month later.
So you show us an honest error in one study that misreported the amount of heating the ocean's undergone, but did not in fact misreport that the ocean's temperature is rising, and that's somehow evidence of widespread exaggerations, scare-mongering, and data manipulation?
I mean I'd love it if 95% of all climate scientists were wrong, but actually existing evidence points to "they're actually right."
The real problem is getting governments and businesses to do anything about it. The former (in the US) won't do anything as long as the kleptocracy runs everything, and the latter will only do it if forced by regulations that the government won't implement because everyone making the decisions is beholden to those same businesses to some extent.
One of the worst things the Republican party ever did, was convince 29-50% of US citizens that climate change and global warming were fake news. Possibly the worst thing.
Humans aren't special. We're not immune to what's happened to so many different species that went before us. The question isn't if humanity will eventually die out, but when and how. Also, when 97% of the scientists in a given field agree that a particular thing is happening, it's not religious to consider the possibility that they might be onto something.
Or just possibly the reason you hadn't heard this before is because it was one study out of the many hundreds carried out and the main reason for singling it out would be to use the initial error in the paper to cast doubt on climate change that does not in fact exist
If there was a point of interest about the study, it was that they used a different methodology to estimate temperature changes in the oceans. The reason the publication originally received some attention was that this method appeared to suggest previous estimates of temperature changes were significantly too low. The revised results though broadly confirm previous estimates, i.e. they just add one more piece of evidence that the existing climate change models are accurately predicting what is happening to the earth's natural systems.
If you are interested in the impact of climate change on the oceans, you might want to have a look at the IPCC paper on "The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate" that is due to be published next month. The IPCC reports are the gold standard for climate change reporting largely because of the amount of effort they put into getting the papers reviewed before publication to try and ensure this type of error does not slip through. The review process for this particular report started in May 2018.
By the way if you want to see what the error referred to in the article was, you can find details of the discussion between the paper's authors and Nicolas Lewis here (though it's a bit technical). The reason I looked for that was because Nicolas Lewis is described in the article as an independent climate scientist who does not believe in human induced global warming. That seemed so unlikely to me that I thought I would look at his work to see what he says himself. Here's a quick summary of my conclusions:
- he's a true skeptic in that he loves nothing more than pointing out errors by other people. That's an incredibly valuable feature in a scientist and, however annoying it may sometimes be to authors, should be treasured
- he accepts the basic tenet of climate change that human produced CO2 results in higher temperatures.
- the largest element of his work relates to the sensitivity of the earth to changes in the level of CO2. The IPCC estimates that a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels would lead to warming of 1.5 to 4.5 C. The reason Lewis is viewed as a climate change skeptic is that he estimates a much lower range of 1.2 to 1.8 C. The difference seems to be partly a feature of the length of time the estimate is expected to cover, but mainly reflects Lewis assumes a significantly higher future absorption of CO2 by natural processes. Thus Lewis believes that if no more CO2 is produced in future the current rise in temperature would slow down and stop much quicker than assumed by the IPCC - but if CO2 continues to be produced the temperature will keep rising.
There's always been an interesting relationship between science and religion - and that's always been used as a source of news. I think Galileo's trial for claiming that the earth revolved around the sun would have been comparable to the OJ Simpson trial in relation to the amount of media interest